


moriception

by keithsforeheadtattoo



Category: Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-27 13:04:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5049655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keithsforeheadtattoo/pseuds/keithsforeheadtattoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"you ever think," rochelle breathes ragged, "you'd be kneeling in a sewer biting off an ace bandage? like a month ago? when you were going double-or-nothing on red?"</p><p>nick pours rubbing alcohol over his hands and makes a face that could be a smile. a month ago he went double-or-nothing on who he thought would get assigned the seg loaf diet, and double was half a pack of cigarettes.<br/> </p><p><b>five vignettes about the senses. but, like, really about transformation and trauma and the undoing of toxic masculinity in the zombie apocalypse</b> <i>(digresses into the sun)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. TOUCH

**Author's Note:**

> written in my personal headcanon timeline lol that accounts for all the otherwise contradictory backstory things of the l4d2dudes?? i.e. how could ellis be seeing zombies for the first time at the hotel but also have had his zombie-proof car torn apart by them prior to the elevator etc etc etc
> 
> also speaking of headcanons i refuse to accept that conman!nick and original concept escapedconvict!nick are mutually exclusive, ok

it's nearing fahrenheit nineties so ro blames it on the fact that they're melting.

10am they found an overturned ice cream truck and she was close to tears over the goopy contents, purple thicknesses sizzling onto the cement from under the crack in the truck door.

"hey, there's your bomb pop," nick said because rochelle had been talking about them lustfully all morning.

"hey, here's my uzi."

ro couldn't even look him in the eye with his suit jacket tied around his waist like someone's damn granny.

ellis tapped her on the shoulder, pink in the cheeks after checking every door on the block for power. "general store," in a voice like the goddamn vannah, "they still got... frozen stuff..." every exhale against her face.

the store had electricity, and a vast and hungry growl curling out from the stockroom.

"i'm not wasting my last molotov for popsicles." nick said, and they were off.

ro craned her neck to smile at the neon JERRY'S DISCOUNT GENERAL instead of ellis because he was already at the head of the line playing coal mine canary again.

at noon they trek through another hotel. this one's fancier so they laugh at the well-dressed zombies and loot unstained clothes from empty rooms. all it's gonna take, rochelle thinks as her eyes trace a bead of sweat down ellis's neck sharply enough to leave a trail, is one more "y'all". she can't stand the twang and wants to collect pieces of it and these feelings are fighting each other in the weirdest way each time he stops the team in its tracks to bandage her scrapes. she chooses a summer dress from the suitcase of an old rich dead lady and chooses ellis to stand guard for her in the penthouse suite while she tries it on.

"you can look if you want," she says playfully, kicking out of her jeans.

"you go with the blue one? or the--"

ellis makes a sound like he got punched in the chest. ro turns around in alarm.

"i thought!" he's blood red. "...i thought you meant the dress."

"we don't have to," rochelle whispers, smiling, but ellis's eyes are already thirty-watt.

"can we?" he whispers back in surprise.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

rochelle puts spent and sweaty kisses all over ellis's arms.

right after they finished she said something about how long it had been and he moaned in a way that seemed decidedly unsexy. still she doesn't put two and two together until now, watching his eyes go in and out of focus like sometimes he's somewhere else, or like somewhere else is where they are now and he's standing guard against the real stuff.

"hey, i'm here, it's cool, we're both cool," she says, and he's good again for a moment, sweet naive half-jokes, hot breath in her hair.

he cries when they're both getting dressed, a permeating full-body sob. ellis says "i'm so sorry" a lot of times. then "everything's really different now, man."

he jumps when she grabs his shoulders from behind. even when he's talking to her.


	2. TASTE

it's molten copper and it fills his mouth in instants. he isn't sure which tooth is piercing the inside of his cheek, enough got smashed out at the root to be plausible candidates. 

"FUCK DEFENSE!" yells some asshole in the bleachers. 

he's fifteen and the only new defense player on the damn team and at the time he doesn't run into the stands and messily behead the adult man trying to berate him for getting his jaw dislocated but that's the revenge fantasy that gets coach through having to hack a witch apart with a crowbar. at the end of it he's bleeding as much as he did then, if that's comparison. but it's like it always is, enough arms and fingers and eyes left to shoot and he's good, he's good, he's good. the two syllables are thick and dripping but the bitch didn't even crack a veneer, it's just torn skin from his molars slamming together.

"sit DOWN." nick actually pushes coach's shoulders to make him, once it's obvious he's firing feet away from targets, seeing near quadruples. it works, anyway. he sits. 

"i don't have time for this shit, officer," coach says to nick's index finger doing slow paces across his line of vision instead of admitting it's impossible to follow. 

ro and ellis are back to back against a wave that's almost all mudmen. she's down to her last clip and ellis has resorted to uppercutting with the body of a broken guitar. coach tries to stand and staggers, vomits the whole bag of twizzlers from the last truck stop into swamp water. 

"BUT YOU CAN'T DIE, EITHER, OKAY, YOU CAN'T FUCK US LIKE THAT." nick is fucking yelling but he's trying desperately to start a rusty chainsaw so yeah, yeah that's why.

everybody can die, is what coach wants to say. when savannah first went to shit he had to fight his way through an elementary school, still half populated. one of the little girls had bows in her hair her mama must have pinned in place that morning. everybody can die and nobody truly has veins that do the gatorade alchemy of turning drive into a fair chance.

"pull the choke open! shit!" coach says instead. nick fumbles for a second and that's enough to revise it to "boy, give it here."

he's so rattled up from getting thumped that his own heartbeat jangles his vision but coach can turn any situation with a chainsaw into a wet and victorious one. apparently. rochelle is over her waist in slimy bog but the only ones close enough to grab her are doing the dead man's float. ellis is slowing like a popcorn bag, discordant guitar slams spacing out further and further. coach opens his mouth, planning thanks for nothin but when he looks, nick is slumped against a wide tree trunk with his jacket peeling off his arms. hands in his hair. his eyes are closed. he gulps air through his mouth til his neck tips, scraping his head against bark. 

"i'm sorry," nick says in that gravelly tone reserved like fine china. "i'm sorry, man."

the last time he got one of those was in some bigger city. concrete, brick-and-mortars, smoldering public transportation ruins. the four of them slept two to a car in the biggest pair nick could hotwire and shit got heavy parked next to the forgiving white noise of a river. nick kissed him on the mouth, all stubble and molten copper before he went all apologies. it only took swiping one white lapel across the red spatter on nick's face to transmute them into a diatribe about humanity's potential end meaning, too, the end of dry cleaning.

"you did what i would've done. if i never learned how to start a goddamn saw up," says coach.

he lets nick bandage him. not because he can't lift his left arm anymore. only because nick said please first. nick's hands are covered in slices. the finger with the rings has a chunk missing. every gold centimeter is sticky, encrusted. they sit side by side with their legs touching in a mile of dark green mud. nick's head keeps lolling but like always ellis's approaching voice scares it back up off coach's shoulder.


	3. SMELL

she hangs her legs through the slats, swinging. one shoelace is untied and dripping water into water, clicking high sounds. she'll say it next time, zoey starts to tell herself. if crew two, as she and louis have been calling them, returns with all their limbs, she'll say it then.

louis thinks they will because they left with first aid packs and because he likes that kid with the baseball cap and the NASCAR attitude. francis keeps rearranging his own bets on which of the four is gonna be the only to return, hurtling up the steps covered in jockeys. 

zoey can't stop thinking about new york. 

"BRIDGE'S BACK HERE!" thunders from around the corner at half past noon. so more than one must've made it round trip -- zoey exhales fast, nasal, as soon as she realizes she's been holding her breath.

"FOUND 'EM, HEY!" truck hat calls, bolting up the first staircase. from christ knows where he's holding a golf club. the douche in the suit follows him at a strut, complaining. 

zoey calls down to them, trying hard to ignore the sound of boots, third in line up the steps. the jangle of earrings. something pungently flowery. tiny heaving breaths. right against her neck --

zoey is in new york again and nineteen again and it's just as dimly lit as it always is when she returns, just as filled with artificial bass and cocktail dresses. she's wearing dolce and gabbana and chanel number five but they're both stolen so somehow it all evens out. 

"i promise," says the zoey of her memory, "i promise," absolutely panting, "and it's got a... a jacuzzi tub and a huge master bedr -- ooooh..."

tiny heaving breaths. right against her neck. the other woman laughing.

"you like that?" she says, the club-volume version of soft; touches zoey's collarbone like harpstring. everything around her is steeped deep in camphor.

zoey closes her eyes and when she opens them she's on a bridge in the same shitstench south that swallowed bill up and francis won't stop saying "taco dog". 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

before the first tank bursts through the wall zoey is pissed off at everything it is and means. she unloads her entire clip into its mouth when it opens and watches its little knees wilt.

"hey hey, travis bickle," rochelle says from the ground floor of the saloon. zoey's glad for the physical space. crew two has been giving her weird marksmanship compliments all morning but this one makes her face burn.

she just yells "gas!" to the huddle of survivors outside and points with her scorching barrel at the can inside the upper deck. "and don't send saturday night fever up here for it or he's coming back down over the railing!" 

rochelle laughs hard and comes out of the saloon to slap nick on the shoulder and zoey's face feels torn apart from smiling twice in the same day.

"i got it," ro assures first her team and then zoey with a long upward glance she doesn't shield her eyes for.

"watch her back, hm?" francis urges. zoey heads inside through a window, pegs a charger between the eyes on the staircase.

"thanks," says rochelle as she breezes past. she steps daintily over the corpse.

zoey resolves she'll say it before they leave.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

by the time they've emptied nine jerry cans into the generator it's almost like the infected can smell their luck curdling. zoey wipes a streak of viscous gut from her forehead that dangles from her fingers before it falls. 

"eye of the storm," nick warns ellis's sigh of relief, "get the fucking lead out!"

coveralls is off like a shot and they're both up the street and over the concrete wall. zoey laughs when nick's pants snag. she's on duty watching coach's back but the latest wave is all flaccid in reeking piles.

"how's the weather up there?" rochelle calls to the balcony. 

zoey keeps catching herself daydreaming about a tight red dress and the scent of lavender. 

"i'm at this hotel for, like, three more nights," says a zoey whose hair is done in smoky-sweet aquanet curls starting to unfurl with sweat. "come over... pleeeeease come over..."

"promise you wouldn't kick me out of bed?" the older woman's voice is low and silky in zoey's ear. 

"i promise," says the zoey of her memory, "i promise..."

pinky and the brain come bolting the way they left with no gas and two tanks tossing cars in their wake because of course they do. coach says "shit" the way people say "wow" and rochelle says "shit" the way people say "well, all right" and zoey just sighs. 

they all run to the balcony to shoot clearer. they all run to the ground floor to dodge rocks. 

"split up!" zoey says (the way people say "you idiots".)

she doesn't want to become the guys from ellis's story who got crushed by a flying hunk of brick wall but she also doesn't want to hear about them so she chooses balcony. louis is there when she gets to the top and zoey has him boost her onto the roof to grab a bile jar. she turns around and rochelle is nearly on the railing, submachine blazing. zoey smashes the glass right in the eyes of the tank trying to rip down the porch's loadbearers. 

a triumphant "EAT IT!" from downstairs signals tank number two's trip home; he comes stumbling out still on fire before he conks into the generator and finally hits gravel. 

"i hate zombies," says rochelle.

the whole city's sour with burnt flesh. zoey's arm has a tear in it at least two inches deep and she just used a warm natty light to rinse puke off her hand and nothing, nothing on this earth that can't physically eat her alive is intimidating.

"can i ask you something?" she says to rochelle. 

louis says he's gonna limp downstairs to cover whoever's getting the last can but he's also heard parts of the hotel story before so it's probably for privacy.

as soon as rochelle steps close enough to ask, zoey knows. even under propane and congealed blood she can make out the linalool. 

if she wasn't sure, the look in rochelle's eyes makes zoey positive.

"you've been to new york before, huh." zoey does like she planned before and says it, doesn't ask. 

"i can... promise you... i have..." rochelle smiles big, warm. the sun is glinting all over her and zoey's whole chest is buzzing.

ellis dents the hood of a car trying to jump out of a spitter puddle while holding gas can number ten.

zoey's eyes are closed and she breathes only lavender.


	4. SIGHT

nick smiles for maybe the first time in fourteen-months-due-to-good-behavior. or at least nine. the last time his finger touched trigger was a waste that he'd have rethought infinitely if he'd known it would take the end of the world for him to hold a glock again. the guy didn't even die and he still had to pay for it in commissary coffee and solitaire. not the full fourteen's worth, since someone in C block caught the germ and grew so big he tore down half the walls. zombies are great. zombies have proved exceedingly practical.

there's a girl with big earrings swinging a crowbar and helicopters be fucked, he'd be quite all right if he had a cold gin and tonic and a place to sit down. the irony of the latter is lost on him, but purposefully. when they get breathing room he mentions propagating the species and she asks "mine or yours?", laughing at him through a rifle scope. she tries out a few like purses. 

"be still my heart," nick says and she promises she can make that happen as soon as she finds the ammo.

her name is rochelle, she says in the elevator, but she's saying it right at elly may clampett (whose real name turns out to be dangerously, hilariously close). the coach says to call him coach, so, fair enough. 

nick mentions that he's gonna bail soon even though he's got no real plans, it just prefaces everything, it was practically part of his vows. the coach asks him to stay a little longer. nick stares into the lights behind the elevator buttons. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

a hundred note floats out of his pocket and into a particularly sludgy patch. nick ducks his head under the arching brick of the sewer without a second glance. it used to be he could turn one of those into a way to smash serious cranium, within the half-hour, even. the water's not quite up to his chest but it's not quite water so he holds his breath.

they all four get in a big fucking fight on the walkway, flinging drips of every bodily fluid from their clothes. so the car alarms on the way into the apartments were absolutely ellis's goddamn fault, and rochelle decided to dick around with the radio at the wedding, but nick had to open the gate, okay, that was how this worked. if he hopped that thing he might have tripped some bigger, louder alarm system than the one creating a thicket of decaying arms around them now. or torn a seam. 

"MUSTA BEEN THREE FOOT, YOU FUCKER!" ellis trumpets over the whacking of skillet against bone. 

"hell," says coach, "i coulda jumped that thing!" and rochelle is just grunting, pounding infected face with an axe.

"NICOLAS." she manages once, in between swings, which is worse than anything else she could've said. he shuts his mouth except to load in pills.

by the time they find the saferoom, coach is popping a loosely swinging shoulder into place and ellis's nose is off-center, streaming unimpeded down his shirt. 

"how we doin'?" nick calls and suddenly he's elbowed into number four in line for the ladder.

rochelle keeps panting, resting her forehead against the metal while she waits for the others to climb. when it's her turn she gets two steps up on trembling limbs and slides back down, barely catching herself with one arm before her face would have hit sewage. nick props a knee under her back and unspools his health kit before anyone dead or georgian can moan at him about it.

"you ever think," rochelle breathes ragged, "you'd be kneeling in a sewer biting off an ace bandage? like a month ago? when you were going double-or-nothing on red?"

nick pours rubbing alcohol over his hands and makes a face that could be a smile. a month ago he went double-or-nothing on who he thought would get assigned the seg loaf diet, and double was half a pack of cigarettes. he hands her a syringe and says something halfhearted about trying to break the habit of sticking a girl before he knows her last name. she says hers is hyphenated and to trust her that he doesn't wanna hear the story.

"think they'll let us borrow one of those stock cars when we get outta here?" nick asks something facetious instead of watching the needle go beneath her skin. secretly, he's been dying to know what ro thinks his cheeseburger museum would be.

"DOOR'S OPEN, GODDAMN!" echoes out of the saferoom. rochelle smirks, tosses the needle once she's done pumping it in her arm. nick spots her the whole way up the ladder, hovering a few rungs underneath.

"hey, what else is in new orleans?" he finally asks as she hits the top.

she helps hoist him onto the ledge by the wrists. leaves pale crescents with her fingernails. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

nick emerges natal out of the gibbs on piano wire hamstrings. the driving shifts were the best part. every other minute was a sophie's choice between bending his limbs into atrophy in the back or a lap-sitting game of musical chairs in the passenger. he stretches each leg on the rear bumper and fires a whole clip at the same jockey. little asshole's probably one of the ones parked on the freeway. probably drove the orange ford pinto. coach says whispering oaks and nick doesn't have the energy to ask if that's an old folks' home or brand of toilet paper.

they shoot holes in lots of colored tents and raid the food booths for anything moldless and elbow piles of clowns in their honking noses. ellis gives the sensor of the test-your-strength tower a potent crack with a billy club. the bell doesn't ring, not even close, and the machine spits a title nick loves in immediacy. 

"all right, li'l peanut, we're heading out," he says, and regrets it once he's halfway through the bumper cars and hears only two sets of footsteps behind him. the whole goddamn tower is sparking from the victory bell down by the time nick turns to look. li'l peanut lights a molotov off one of the machine's shorted wires to throw at the horde he invited. there's a machete blade buried inches in the sensor pad.

"do you know how fucking much i look out for you?!" nick says once the last park staffer is face-down in a permanent way. "says" is also generous. but it's windy, okay, and that broken piece of shit keeps fizzing and he's all sweaty and he never meant to be in georgia, especially not for the apocalypse. so he's yelling. he's definitely yelling.

ellis is totally unfazed; asks "so d'you want the snake one, or the gator?" pointing at a row of stuffed prizes.

nick sighs. dutifully reminds him that he didn't have to win the game to take one since there's some seriously laissez-faire capitalism going on lately. and that if the snout is pointed it's probably a crocodile. 

they make the copter in time, but barely. the pilot is cool. older dude. likes tony bennett. he starts up a hacking cough a few minutes into the flight and nick already knows where this'll head. it's like he'd be a pessimist if he wasn't right all the time, he thinks, pulling shards of glass out of his face inside an abandoned swamp shack. 

"what did i say about southern drivers and shit ending in flames?" he says, to lighten the mood, but li'l peanut is having none.

"NICK, WHAT THE HELL, YOU SHOT THE PILOT."

the kid's just on edge because when they ran the roller coaster tracks he dropped that gnome he got from the shooting range. also duly won. by the time they've gone fifty paces he's waxing on the "backwards, nonsense, swamp-ass layout" of neighborhoods they haven't seen yet.

"i know, babe, i know. it sure isn't georgia." says rochelle. ellis's defensive huff turns into a wounded sound.

they spend the night in something halfway between safehouse and drainage pipe. there are sleeping bags waiting, some still rolled. one of them has a dora the exporer pattern and they try the obligatory jokes about who on their crew it's for but there's not a lot to lighten up anything both child-sized and bloodstained. nick's hip hasn't quit bitching since coach decided they should all look for supplies in that one shack. he volunteers for first guard shift because he doesn't have an unbruised edge left to sleep on. rochelle's supposed to be his shift partner but only ten minutes in, her head starts bobbing. ellis stands, taps her out without speaking. she falls asleep right away under the thunderous white noise of coach's breath.

nick keeps straining to listen for infected, even the ones he can't shoot. especially the ones he can't shoot. yet.

"hey, i was nervous as hell, too, my first week out fightin' 'em."

"what?" nick says. with no confusion, all offense. 

ellis just smiles. even his mouth is fucking benign. "you don't have to be embarrassed, shit. someone spat acid on you today. 's'okay to get nervous."

"i haven't done that since high school," nick assures him.

"got spat on?" says ellis. he's smiling again. or maybe still.

"is everything you say a joke or are you genuinely very stupid? ever since the hotel it's the only thing i've been wondering." nick says. full eye contact. even for him, it's. bad. 

ellis laughs like at a punchline he's heard before and takes cigarettes out of his medical pack that nick would have pretended to be nice to him for, fuck. he smokes one silently to the filter and shoves another under his hat brim. 

"you fuck with your rings." he says, grinding the butt out on nick's shoe. they're covered in zombie puke and even if they weren't he deserves it, so nick lets him. "when you're nervous." ellis finishes, breathes out carbon. he points at the evidence. nick already knows, he's been doing it since he started wearing enough at a time to juggle them. but yeah, they're all on the same finger now. his trigger. his. index.

ellis doesn't talk much the rest of the night, but he lets nick have the two cigarettes it takes to keep from killing himself. nick doesn't mention that that's what they're for. coach taps him out and nick picks his jacket up from where he'd shucked it at dusk when they barricaded the doors. reconsiders that bullet to the mouth upon finding the crocodile stowed away in one of the sleeves. maybe it's an alligator. it is from a theme park in fucking georgia. he wouldn't know from georgia. he didn't do any of the navigation, for three days solid nick was content to follow someone he was sure knew what he was doing. 

for the next ten minutes nick can't keep his eyes shut even though he's so tired they've gone sandy. 

"you're really good at driving." nick ejects as soon as he hears boots come off next to him. because he wants to go to sleep, okay. 

"and... thank you for helping me up on the coaster tracks." fuck. okay. he keeps thinking of that stupid gnome. it fell from the highest part, clunking all the way down between a pair of beams. nick almost fell from the highest part but here he is now in a shredded eddie bauer. 

"and all those pipe bombs at the concert. and all those goddamn hunters in rayford. and that shit with the fire in the hotel hallway." nick shuts his eyes. but not like a sliding door. like tinfoil. "and holding the elevator for me."

there's other ones, a lot more, but now nick keeps rewatching that memory, scrubbing it so hard his mouth won't work. ellis with his boot across the door sensor, leaning out into the hall to yell for nick before he knew his name. rochelle was already hammering the buttons with her palm.

when nick opens his eyes the kid is smiling again. or maybe still.

"do you know how fucking much i look out for you?" says ellis, like it's from a movie.

nick changes the wrapping on an aging gash and answers each question ellis spouts about his tattoos, ribs hurt like childbirth and yeah this one's spelled wrong and twenty bucks cuz i knew the guy and prison, prison, my sister, an artist in germany, prison. the sun comes up before his head goes down. fuck. okay. 

he can't have been out more than two hours when he wakes to the click and heave of a grenade launcher. nick yawns. there's a whole horde jamming their arms through the door's metal bars.

"MORNIN'!" ellis trumpets over the whacking of skillet against bone. he found that pan in the saloon yesterday. mentioned zombie grits and lit up like a firecracker when nick laughed.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

anchoring at the docks he and rochelle both call it duh caydel, but nick takes the word of several authentic hicks that it's probably duke attell. can't they just sugar the gas tank? he says it aloud once he's so mosquito bitten he needs the release. can't they just siphon off these buses that keep blocking every goddamn road they need to go down? what's the opposite of a miracle? 

nick gets the shit beat out of him at a garage sale, for neither the first nor second time in his life. he gets a pretty good jacket, too. there's only two hands warm and large and dextrous enough to catch his lapels, so nick doesn't even flinch when he's dragged backwards by the collar.

"i'm fine, don't waste supplies," he tries, but it's already under the motion of a big thumb smearing neosporin. nick always squirms, not because of the sting. "if anything infected's gonna kill me it won't be a cut on my arm."

"yeah, yeah," says coach. "now hush," while he stops up the long one right beneath nick's jaw. first with gauze, then a t-shirt. nick doesn't realize how bad it is until he glances down and the new jacket's painted in dark running streaks. it starts to rain, which could help if it weren't fucking leather.

the cornfield he's been making cracks about since landing his ass in the south punishes him now by becoming corporeal and standing between them and the fuel. coach whistles "save me some sugar" all the way across the elevated pipes. there was a bar in rayford with that disc in the jukebox and coach fonzed the thing until it played on repeat. it's still in nick's head as he lays back-to-pavement with his face lacerated, rainwater dropping in the wounds. they're outside the gas station, it's so close he can smell rotten poboy. coach hits the saferoom first, blasts grenades into the swarms burrowing out of the cornstalks. he switches to a rifle to cover as ellis crawls inside, smashing shins with that pan. coach pegs each legless one in the head as they fall. rochelle drags nick in by the arms. the four of them lay for the umpteenth time this week in a soaked and heaving pile. 

"virgil's an asshole," nick groans, and they all laugh in the relief that's become phase two inevitably. phase one, some iteration of collapsing on each other. three is usually boarding up entryways and four had better be something like profit. 

somewhere in between one and four, between ducatel and savannah, this other phase has bloomed where they all heal each other instead of themselves. 

the storefront has a bell that jingles as they each exit and melts as a spitter's aim overshoots nick's head. the whole glass door flows in rivulets. nick hums "save me some sugar" all the way back across the pipes. rochelle tells a joke about an elevator as theirs shudders upwards into a bramble of reaching hands. 

in a weird office on the second floor of a millyard ro unearths the supervisor's snack drawer, mountains of permanently unperishable bright corn syrupy packages. the four cluster like a horde. they're all giggling like in church, there's still crying echoing outside every mill door. he trades coach something chocolate he found, children at halloween, doesn't make any jokes, not since the plantation house where he noticed how long coach would wait to eat no matter how little time they had if he thought anybody was looking. nick got strung up by a smoker right after and it didn't feel karmatic enough. nick laughs dorito crumbs into his hand at a story about keith and a horsefly.

they're pretty smashed to shit by the time their return trip cuts through the inside of the mill. ellis did fucking something with a propane tank in the warehouse that worked, really well, but also on living people. nick nurses a freshly loosened tooth at the back of his jaw. elbows an office window to shards and steps through the frame's fanged mouth. there's something breathing downstairs. there always is. he and coach make the kids wait on the second floor. monsters under the bed, nick says, or something like it, lightning keeps unraveling towards them through the hole in the roof.

they make it two steps on the ground floor before there's rolling chairs coming at concussive speeds, garbled roars echoing. nick lands blows with a baseball bat that feel like hitting concrete. he hits concrete, face first. tank fucking throws him by the front of the shirt. his body punches through a molding office door. nick focuses on shotgun blasts thudding from the balcony, on the drawers of the closest file cabinet, Q through S all share but Z has its own and passing out is not an option. he spits teeth across the floorboards. nick focuses on fireworks, fire that spreads across the balcony from the gas cans ellis set like traps, fireworks over the charles river and she always wants his coat she's always cold. nick runs his fingers through his hair, they come away tacky, thick with strings. the head wound's gushing.

rochelle hollers from the second floor. nick pulls his vision like a heavy cord out of the back of his brain and even still both eyes won't work together. the tank's got something big in its arms. and coach is limping, limping.

"HEY!" nick calls, and calls again, his mouth is filling with rain, or maybe his lungs. his clip is too heavy to lift up and load. nick screams and throws office supplies until the tank's craggy form comes lumbering.

he takes the diesel off his back, so coach and virgil and the kids can still have it.

the tank grinds him into the floor with a desk.

nick wakes up to bacon burning and midnight riders lyrics sung off-key and for a second this could be it. but then he lands the rest of the way, there's rain drilling in and his right leg would feel better amputated and he's coming to consciousness in a country full of motherfucking running jumping dead people. 

"quit fussin'," right next to his ear, "and let me heal you."

nick lays stagnant through minutes of bandaging. listens to thunder and paraphrased verses of "all i want for christmas is to kick your ass".

"whaddaya say, coach, will i play next season?" he smirks when the first layer's done. 

there's a witch at the garage sale by the time they pass through it again, bawling over a soaked stack of hendrix LPs. nick kind of gets it, but he readies a bottle bomb for her anyway.

"watch my back," he implores, funneling motor oil. 

"what," says ro, "so your band-aids don't flap?"

nick tucks in a kerosene rag and watches claws grasping at vinyl. those things really do cry a little like marla. they do the same shit, too, rip everything you know and love and wear to shreds if you stay in the southern states too long.

the four of them wait in a truck bed until the rain eases. 

"i could go," says ellis, reaching for the molotov when nick ignites it. ellis likely has two broken ribs and two decades fewer logged on earth.

"lights out." nick says as punctuation and creeps over the rusted lip of the ford.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

virgil doesn't mention how long it took them, just trades them cold beers for their gas cans.

"i tells ya, us carriers are the best carriers!" he says, laughs hearty like it was a pun. nick's brow knits. virgil said it once before, about himself. nick thought he was just being cajun about chauffering people around. 

it takes an hour of beef jerky and untempered stories for them to split up into sleep shifts. it used to be that would happen as soon as they hit a saferoom and the final seconds of sunset but now each time they've got space to breathe they keep filling it. ellis and ro sing the chorus of something they both can't remember any verses to. nick slides a ring from one hand to the other. requests the first guard shift. keeps thinking of plague rats.

for the next stretch until new orleans, nick has virgil and the gulf of mexico as his shift partners. the other three tried, offered to split it with him, asked if he needed anything. 

"just shoot me if i start to go old yeller," nick said, and rochelle moaned, asked if they really had to wait til then.

he keeps seeing shoreline mirages like terrible ghosts. every pilot, agent, shopkeeper they've shared air with who wasn't dead to start ended up that way so fast. except virgil. virgil the carrier. nick watches his own veins crest and fall under the tendons of his fingers. nick watches three backs to make sure they still move like the tides.


	5. SOUND

at first he doesn't notice, cuz rushing blood in his ears is always the only thing after he gets knocked on his ass. it's just when another one jumps him from behind and he starts screaming and nothing comes out but them things start swarming like they heard.

ellis's heartbeat climbs even though he's next to a fresh mound of limp ones, all double-tapped. his colt 45 was silent.

"shit," he says, or maybe he shouts it, he wouldn't know. he wouldn't know. shit.

he spends a full day crying in the employee break room of a circle K before one of the workers comes back spraying that slimy acid all over the place. he drops an unbolted bike rack on her in the parking lot and doesn't realize til he's drowning in the runners that he set off a car alarm. ellis does the thing he told himself he'd do, where when he knows he's gonna die he prays to mama like she's god and sets as much shit on fire as he can in five seconds. 

he remembers one of the drooly ones getting him by the throat and smashing his head against the windshield of a BMW til his skull broke the glass. the next thing left in his brain after that is someone on a motorcycle mowing down a whole row of k-mart mutants. the next thing is her taking off her riding helmet and boy does he remember everything after that.

on a dry-erase board in the cafeteria of a retirement home, by the light of an igneous stack of phonebooks, she writes out her name and hometown and how long she's been fighting the horde by herself. ellis does the same but numbers each item, with his name 2 on the list, 1 being "DONT STAND CLOSE TO EXPLOSIONS". he makes a few ear gestures, too demonstrative. she already gets the picture. "you'll heal," he reads on her lips. or maybe "hear" but at this point they're synonyms. after they run through a 7-11 she tosses him a pack of earplugs and almost forcibly trades him his colt for a baseball bat.

she's trying to find her sister, she tells him on a denny's placemat. there's unspoiled food left in the kitchen so they make what ellis titles an "okay slam". he asks how old her sister is but when she says twelve and asks if he's heard anything from that part of the country ellis is out of questions and answers and jokes. 

"headed that way 2 if u want backup???" is the second draft he presents for approval. it's pretty much the first draft, just with "want" to replace the hastily crossed-out "need". honestly, ellis thinks, that might have been what sealed the deal.

by the time dawn breaks they're strapping into full militia gear to go through a toy store. she makes him follow her in; either ellis's lip reading is improving or she just said "fuck chivalry" very, very clearly. she keeps making him switch melee arms, too, which is driving him damn crazy cuz his left one's the best one by a clear mile. she's cool, though. seems like she likes that band depeche mode but ellis hasn't put together enough hand motions to ask about that yet.


End file.
